The US also allows their athletes to dope if they snitch on other players, and possibly sabotage them. I’m sure every country has massive cheaters, but if American athletes are taking down other dopers to secure their spot, those countries are at a cheating disadvantage.
That always pisses me of. Gold should be about 8-15 (13) silvers. Unless the silvers are tiny and the golds huge. if it's in the iron age, bronze should be company script. If it's not, bronze should be very expensive, to the point many farmers still use flint tools because they can't afford bronze. Think of how during the trail of tears the amerindians had holy tablets made of copper, because for a neolithic society copper was immensely precious. The ratios can be a little of, but not too much or else the geology of the planet is going to be very weird. Gold is mined first, so if you are writing a story and put the ratio very low, as in 1:3 or 1:4 then your civilization is relatively new to mining.
The reason the prices are so messed up today are financial shenanigans.
I think it’s in the book “Games of Empire” where the argument is made that the worlds in fantasy games are usually just recreations of our modern capitalist world, aforementioned financial shenanigans very much included. These games often have the aesthetics of a kind of mediaeval feudalism, but in-game economies feature very modern things like decimalised currency, auction houses, arbitrage, consumerist alienation, instant payments, and so on, all of which would be very out of place in a feudal world. Fantasy RPGs show us worlds that appear radically different from our own at first glance, but upon deeper examination they are another example of the social imaginary restrained by capitalist realism.
There are a bunch of dumbass sports that no one gives a shit about like equestrian and golf and sailing lol.
There’s a reason why most of the highly covered sports are sports that theoretically can be mastered by anybody in the world regardless of financial situation and upbringing - aquatics, athletics, soccer, etc. Get rid of the bougie nonsense, and I imagine the US drops down by a couple dozen medals
Athletics and swimming represent roughly half of all US medals. Athletics, swimming, gymnastics, and wrestling respresent 75 or 80% of all medals. The bougie medals, equestrian, golf, sailing, fencing? rowing? tennis? represent 9/122 by my count.
also the us literally won gold in womens soccer. And got a medal in every track and field relay.
Swimming and athletics dominate the medal counts because they have different events, just like speed skating in the winter olympics.